A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 253A new teak plantationnear the San Carlos Riverin northern Costa Rica.Exposed soil heated bydirect tropical sunlight islikely to release significantquantities of carbon.A Costa Rican acaciaplantation. The logs in theforeground have beendiscarded and left to rot.In a few years, they willrelease all their carbonback to the atmosphere.say, 100 years, it does not necessarily follow that carbon sequesteredfor 10 years will have one-tenth the climatic effect of carbon sequesteredfor 100 years. Again, the problem is not that any given patchof trees is temporary, but that there’s so much uncertainty and ignoranceabout how to measure its relevance to climate. It’s not a matterof calculable ‘risk’, but something far more recalcitrant to marketaccounting.In addition, tonne-year accounting can make what allowances it doesmake for uncertainty only at the cost of generating carbon creditsslowly. That makes it unattractive to business. It also militates againstsmall projects. The CATIE study found that at prices of usd 18 pertonne – more than actual prices as of 2006 – the tonne-year methodologywould allow profits only in projects of over 40,000 hectares.Then there is a method called ‘average storage adjusted for equivalencetime’ (ASC), which generates credits more quickly.Other methods include the UN’s ‘temporary’ Certified EmissionsReductions (tCERs), which expire at the end of the Kyoto Protocol’ssecond commitment period and must be replaced if retired forcompliance in the first commitment period; and ‘long-term’ credits(lCER)s, which expire and must be replaced if the afforestation orreforestation project is reversed or fails to be verified. None of theseapproaches, however, address the basic problems of uncertainty andignorance described in Chapter 3. In fact, not even the atmosphericlifetime of carbon dioxide emissions can be pinned down with anyprecision, as mentioned above. For business, this translates into accountingheadaches and high economic risk.In the end, CATIE came to the conclusion that CDM forestryprojects had to be big in order for it to be worthwhile to fulfil all theaccounting and other requirements. Out of a total of over 1,500 simulatedscenarios, only 8 per cent made it possible for projects under500 hectares to participate. The mean size of a profitable project was5,000 hectares. One way out would be to bundle smaller projectstogether and employ standardised assumptions and procedures, butagain that would magnify accounting mistakes and also would behard to achieve, given the Costa Rican land tenure system.You’ve talked a lot about how much harder it is to measure how much carbon issequestered in tree projects than simply to keep fossil carbon in the ground. Butmaybe we don’t need to compare carbon sequestered in trees with carbon storedin fossil deposits. We should think of forestry carbon projects like Costa Rica’sas replacing carbon released from forests, not as replacing carbon released fromfossil fuel combustion. This should solve the measurement problem, since all wehave to do is compare biotic carbon with other biotic carbon.